Caught in Grace

Hello Bloggie Friends!  Happy Weekend!  I hope I didn’t totally confuse you by changing the name and the look of my blog all at once.  It was a bloggie overhaul makeover for sure!  For months, I’ve been thinking and praying about a new blog name and I wanted a new look to go with it.  I wanted a name that was a little more creative, a little more catchy, and something with more meaning to it than just “The Scott Family”.  Over and over, I just kept coming back to “Caught in Grace” and I think it describes my life in a nutshell (at least as much as three words could).

So I was pretty much a “good” kid growing up.  I asked Jesus into my heart when I was 12 years old (or somewhere around there) and I was basically a rule follower.  I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t party, didn’t skip school etc. etc. etc….  Sometime during my college years, I started wondering why I would go to hell if I didn’t have Jesus as my Savior.  I mean, what did I do that was so bad?  I wasn’t a bad person, I was good.  I remember praying about it, asking Jesus about it.  And, can I tell you?  He started showing me my depravity, my need for a Savior.  Maybe I wasn’t doing all the ‘bad’ things, but my heart wasn’t exactly pure either.  There was selfishness, greed, pride, impatience, unkind thoughts, the list could go on.  So since I am a perfectionist by nature, I wanted to fix myself, I worked hard on myself, I was hard on myself.  At that point, I didn’t understand grace.  I didn’t understand, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9).  What I didn’t understand then, what He has patiently been showing me over the years, is that I can’t fix myself, I can’t make myself good enough, no matter how hard I try.  But the good news is that because of His grace, God can and does make me good enough.  I am a work in progress.  He loves me and accepts me just as I am, but at the same time, he’s working on me to make me who He wants me to be. 

After college, Tim and I started dating.  For about two years, we dated, we he got confused, we took ‘breaks’ to pray, we even broke up for real one time, we got back together, we fasted, and we prayed some more.  I made that sound as if it was all hard and confusing, but it wasn’t, there was a lot of happiness and fun throughout those two years too.  To sum it up, it was one of the best times of my life (falling head over heels in love, pitter pattering heart, new and exciting relationship) and one of the hardest (trying to discern if Tim was “the one”, feeling heart broken and lost when we broke up, periods of confusion).  But by the end of our dating relationship, God had done some amazing things that got rid of any doubt or confusion surrounding our relationship.  Beyond any shadow of a doubt, I knew we were meant to be together and Tim knew it too.  No matter how much we stumbled through our dating relationship, no matter that we got confused and broke up, no matter what happened, by His grace, God kept us together and worked out His will in our lives. 

As an adult, there have been times, especially over the last two years when I felt God speaking to me about specific situations in which I was to walk with eyes of faith.  It always went against what made sense, what I could see, or what I felt.  Most of those time, I felt as if I was on a long, dark trail and I couldn’t see where I was going.  I couldn’t see which way to turn.  I couldn’t see the roots and rocks along the trail that might trip me up.  A lot of times, doubts would flood me and I wasn’t even sure if I was on the right trail anymore.  I would spin in circles for awhile, totally losing my way.  And then, I would reach out for God’s hand in the dark, and sometimes I couldn’t find it right away.  So I would desperately call out to Him and try to hear His voice and even then, sometimes His voice seemed to be faint or drowned out by my own doubts or thoughts.  So I would listen closer, petrified of going the wrong way or missing Him.  But He never gave up on me.  He never got tired of finding me if I got mixed up and wandered the wrong way for awhile.  He never got tired of waiting for me if I got overwhelmed and stopped to throw a pity party rest.  He never left me stranded on my own.  There were times that I was overcome with doubts and I stumbled along, there were other times that I tried to walk by my own sight and tripped on bumps and stumps, there were times I wandered off the trail, times I fell, but because of His grace, God was always right there to pick me up and get me back on track.  His grace set me in the right direction.  By His grace, I had the strength to keep going.  And His grace always brought me through to the other side. 

And even on a daily basis, I stumble, I mess up both as a wife and a mom.  I lose my patience, I get off balance or focus on the wrong things (the house needs to be clean vs. my kids want to play with me), I can be selfish, my words can be rude, thoughtless, or sharp, sometimes I am just plain grumpy.  Like I said, I’m a perfectionist, so I tend to have a hard time extending myself grace when I’ve messed up (which is often).  But I am learning that when I stumble, when I make a mistake, when I outright screw up and sin, God’s grace has me covered.  I can rest in it.  It will always be there.  It will always be enough.        

God’s grace is what saves me and by His grace, God keeps me in His hand.  There is grace when I mess up, there is grace to cover my every sin, there is grace to help me change, and there is grace to accept me and love me in the process of it all.  Through grace, He works out His will for my life and makes me who He wants me to be.  By grace, He will bring me home to Him, perfect in Christ.  I am surrounded by grace.  I am caught in grace.